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    Category: Foucault

    • From Discipline to Control to “Please Hold while I transfer your call”

        In a famous essay, Deleuze suggests that our society has moved beyond Foucauldian disciplinary power to a more fluid “control society,” where the various sites of disciplinary control merge into a modulated network of interlocking sites of power, the primary technique of which is access control.  As Deleuze notes, the move is “dispersive,” and…

    • Neoliberal economics and the devalued humanities

      In his critique of Posner’s economic analysis of law, the late Ed Baker offers some remarks that might help us to understand current developments in educational policy.  Posner defends what we will now recognize as a number of the core commitments of neoliberal policy, in particular the fundamental efficiency of markets and the price mechanism…

    • Eric Schliesser on “Lice and Biopolitics”

      Schliesser thought he could escape the Borg, but a senior philosopher elsewhere has tracked him down for us here. In this very interesting reflection, he writes about the head-lice inspection all Dutch kids undergo at school, and connnects it to Foucaultian analyses of biopolitics (or, with less fancy terms, that government rationality that licences, among…

    • Privacy and Big Data III: When Security beats Privacy

      In a second court ruling on the NSA’s metadata collection program, Judge Pauley rejected virtually all of the arguments raised by the ACLU and other plaintiffs against the program.  This opinion thus stands opposed to Judge Leon’s ruling of a few weeks before (my analysis of that is here).  Here I want to look at…

    • Privacy and Big Data II: NSA Metadata between Juridical Power and Biopower

      In a previous post, I suggested that the concept of privacy is going to prove inadequate as a protection against big data.  This is the case for structural reasons: the concept of privacy is designed to protect information (generally, either information that is thought to be inherently intimate, or in the sense of control over…

    • My Dad went to LSU, and all I got was this lousy pee-cup

      A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol…